Tag Archives: C-Span

Early in the year, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney both confess that from the very beginning the whole weapons of mass destruction/al-Qaeda had ties to Saddam Hussein thing was a total fabrication – and – the entire Iraq War was a total fraud that was all about Big Oil. Criminal proceedings begin. The next day on his show, Rush Limbaugh explains to his audience that the confessions were false, based on a voodoo curse put on them by Bill Clinton before he left office. The day after that, a Rasmussen poll will show that 20% of the American population buys into this. Thus, the beginning of the “curser movement.”

In late spring, Glenn Beck will define the following groups as “domestic terrorists” – all public school teachers, all union members, all Democrats, all moderate Republicans, The Humane Society, The Red Cross, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America and Christian Scientists. The next day, a CBS/NY Times poll shows 29% of the American population buy into this.

Sarah Palin develops a severe eating disorder and accuses Michelle Obama of trying to cut off her credit with Dominoes Pizza.

Failed Teabagger endorsed Nevada Senatorial Candidate Sharron Angle returns to the media spotlight by demanding not only an end to Social Security, but a demand that the government force all current retires to not only lose their monthly benefits, but also work in forced labor camps to repay the government the Social Security “largess” they’ve already received. Teabaggers cheerfully endorse Angle’s proposal at a national Teabag convention. Estimates have it that 67% of Teabaggers in attendance are retirees.

K Street Lobbyists heavily lobby Congress to change the wording of the Pledge of Allegiance to “and to the oligarchy, for which it stands, one nation, totally divided, with liberty and justice only to the highest bidder.” Republican leaders in both the House and Senate go on board with this instantly. “Self styled Socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders(I-VT) also endorses the idea but notes he interprets the re-wording as creative sarcasm. Upon hearing this, Senator Mitch McConnell(R-KY) immediately calls for Senator Sanders to be deported.

Space Aliens invade America later in the year. After watching C-Span for 5 minutes, they re-occupy their space ships and head back for home.

(With apologies to our porcine friends who also happen to suck scum, but don’t have much influence on the electorate.)

While some readers may chastise me for gross understatement in the title, and I take their point, I decided to keep this clean, or as clean as you can when describing the contents of the sole working Port-O-Potty on free chili and beer night at a baseball game.

What makes Republican word-whacker Frank Luntz my target is that he is an intentional and dedicated deceiver of the public, smart enough to know full well what he’s doing, but blithely willing to trot out his wares — borrowed from the misuse of modern psychological techniques to sell the gullible what they don’t need joined with a carnival conman’s shell game pitch — for the temporary benefit of his bank account, while his country slides into a wreckage of divisiveness and debt. If you’d like to find the home base for the decimation of our public speech into ignorant, inflamed, fearful, flag-draped hatred; the revision of our history into a reeking bonanza of selfish suicidal capitalism, evangelical Christian crapola and nasty neoconservative warhawk bilge; and the reduction of our political discourse into so much overheated, oversimplified, covertly racist, sound-bite slag, you can point to three names: the late Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and the lesser-known, but every bit as important, Frank Luntz as the authors of the meltdown in progress.

It was Frank’s notion to rename a bill allowing more pollution as the ‘Clean Air Act’; it was Luntz who told the GOP to re-label estate taxes as ‘death taxes’ so that the wealthy paid less while the rest of us took up the slack; it was his demented mind that connected Iraq to 9/11 and instructed Republican pols to always preface any mention of the failed Iraq incursion with ‘9/11 changed everything’; behind nearly every current and past GOP talking point, endlessly repeated in the Right-Wing Echo Chamber, you’ll find Frank’s pasty round face, tirelessly choosing just the right words to convince a malleable faction of the American public to eat corporate Republican turds and think it’s prime rib.